THE SECRET LIFE OF F.D.C. WILLARD
A Purr-fectly Good Way to Make Your Editor Happy
In the November 24, 1975, edition of the academic journal Physical Review Letters, there was a paper by two researchers titled “Two-, Three-, and Four-Atom Exchange Effects in bcc 3He.” The authors of the paper were J.H. Hetherington and F.D.C. Willard, both identified as members of the Michigan State University physics department. Five years later, Professor Willard, showing that his expertise in that isotope of helium extended beyond the English language, published an article in a French science magazine on the antiferromagnetic properties of Helium-3. F.D.C. Willard was quite the scholar—and also a cat.
Willard (which wasn’t his real name, as you’ll learn about in more detail shortly) was owned by a human by the name of Professor Hetherington. Hetherington was, as his credentials correctly outlined, a physics professor at Michigan State, and he was the one who actually wrote both papers. And in almost all other situations, he would have been the sole author listed on the paper. But in this situation, there was a wrinkle in that plan.
Hetherington had written the first paper using “we” and “our” throughout, but before he submitted it, a colleague noted that the editors of Physics Review Letters frowned upon the use of plural first-person pronouns in papers with only one author. Changing all of these pronouns to “I”s and “my”s, unfortunately, was not as easy as a modern find-and-replace on the computer, as the word-processing technology during the time of his writing was the typewriter. Instead, Hetherington needed a collaborator to credit—something that was difficult, given that the paper was entirely his work.
As a solution to his predicament, Hetherington added his cat as the second author. F.D. stood for “Felis domesticus,” the genus and species of the common house cat. The C stood for “Chester,” the cat’s actual name, and “Willard” was the name of the cat’s father—the closest thing young Chester the cat had to a family name. Hetherington credited the fictitious professor Willard as a coauthor and positioned him as a colleague of his at Michigan State.
Ultimately, Hetherington did reveal his coauthor’s true identity in 1978. The most commonly told story (recounted by organic chemistry professors Alex Nickon and Ernest F. Silversmith) is that he was effectively forced to do so when “a visitor came to campus to see Professor Hetherington, found him unavailable, and then asked to speak to Willard.” He apparently was not sorry for his ruse, either, noting that most other scientists appreciated the humorous solution to his plural pronoun problem.
Willard, despite being a cat, wasn’t done, though. A few years later, he “authored” another work, this time all on his own—and written in French! In 1980, Willard’s byline graced an article in the French popular science magazine La Recherche. Of course, at this point the cat was out of the bag when it came to his identity. The real authors of the essay were a group of French and American scientists (including Hetherington). Creative differences over the content of the article resulted in none of them wanting their real name printed on it. Willard came to the rescue, taking credit once again.